Staying one step ahead

Thursday

Jul 3, 2014 at 12:01 AM

STOCKTON - The Fourth of July is around the corner, and with it comes the summer heat, a historic drought, tinder-dry conditions and a lot of people who consider it the right time to indiscriminately shoot illegal incendiary devices into the sky.

Zachary K. Johnson

STOCKTON - The Fourth of July is around the corner, and with it comes the summer heat, a historic drought, tinder-dry conditions and a lot of people who consider it the right time to indiscriminately shoot illegal incendiary devices into the sky.

For the emergency agencies in charge of putting out the fires, the holiday stretches resources to the limit, and they often need to help each other out.

On Wednesday morning, fire chiefs gathered to fine tune a new approach that officials say better equips them to pool what resources they do have this year to tackle the fires as they come.

"We're trying to figure out a better way to deal with the Fourth of July," said Dennis Bitters, Ripon fire chief and the incident commander for the San Joaquin All-Hazards Incident Management Team. "We all agree it's getting worse and worse."

There are already systems in place for different fire departments to assist one another during emergencies - something that drew different crews across jurisdictional lines last Fourth of July as fires sprung up across the county and a large fire at a Stockton box factory burned through the night after being set alight by illegal fireworks.

It's a new plan this year to cobble together a pair of strike teams ahead of time, instead of drawing from available resources when the fire is already burning. These teams will be in two places, north of Stockton at Flag City near Interstate 5 and Highway 12, and to the south, at Highway 99 and Arch Road. They will act as mobile teams, going from fire to fire, if needed.

The incident management group is made up of medical agencies and fire districts from across the county, but not city fire departments.

History shows population density and the amount of illegal fireworks make the Stockton area the busiest part of the county on the holiday, said Matt Duaime, Stockton Fire Department battalion chief. The Fire Department is handling the anticipated spike in need by looking at its staffing over the 96 hours that includes the holiday in the middle. It allows there to be extra personnel on July 4, to deal with the need both inside and outside the city limits, he said.

Because of the drinking and boating and other festivities that tend to go on during a holiday weekend, medical officials expect there will be more injuries than normal happening, too, said Phillip Cook, medical health specialist for San Joaquin County Emergency Medical Services.

The fire and medical officials met in the Robert J. Cabral Agricultural Center Agricultural Center on Wednesday to go over the plan and divvy out remaining responsibilities. Over the past three years, the calls for service countywide on the Fourth of July have been 60 percent higher than typical call volumes, according to some of the statistics in the plan.

Each strike team will have a water truck with it, which shows planning for drought conditions that could have affected available water in rural areas, said county Emergency Coordinator Michael Cockrell, head of the San Joaquin County Office of Emergency Services. He said the last time there had been a local team like this was during the Tracy tire fire, which burned for two years in the late 1990s.

With the exceptionally dry conditions, coordination is important, said Bob Elliott, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors.

"We're all in this together to make this as safe a holiday as we can."

Contact reporter Zachary K. Johnson at (209) 546-8258 or zjohnson@recordnet.com. Follow him at recordnet.com/johnsonblog and on Twitter @zacharykjohnson.